Heading north!

On Thursday, March 14th, I took a bus shuttle to Pearson Airport and then flew to Ottawa.  I met up with Ashley and Niall in Ottawa and on Friday morning, we flew slightly less than three hours to Iqaluit.  We were supposed to catch a connecting flight to Igloolik, however, our flight was cancelled... which happens often enough that the airlines put a sticker on your boarding pass to the effect of "We are not responsible for your meals or accommodations if your flight is cancelled."

So we were "stranded" in Iqaluit for the night and quite lucky to find a hotel by the sounds of it--the first two hotels we called were booked solid and the third hotel took quite a few rings to get a hold of!  The solo man at the front desk of the hotel, the Frobisher Inn, said they had 100 people on the waiting list for the weekend.

Ashley and I (in red) in front of the Iqaluit sign.

So we made the most of it.  After dropping our luggage off at the hotel, we walked down to get shawarma and donairs from a Lebanese restaurant.  While eating lunch, Ashley quizzed Niall and I on various Nunavut facts, such as What is the population of Bathurst Inlet?  Can you guess? (Answer below)  We saw some pretty interesting buildings along the way, like this one:

A bank and gift shop in Iqaluit, NU.

We also stopped by the post office to mail postcards to friends and family at home.  The symbols you see on the sign next to "Iqaluit" is the city's name in Inuktitut--one of Nunavut's four official languages.  The name "Iqaluit" means "many fish", and not "plenty of fish" like Niall accidentally answered when Ashley quizzed us (I wonder what website he visits...).  The answer to the previous question--according to the tourist guide book we were reading, the population of Bathurst Inlet is 5.  According to Wikipedia, that information is from the 2001 census.  The 2011 census reads population: 0.

Iqaluit post office.

 And of course, as Canadians, we couldn't call Iqaluit a "city" without one of these:

Iqaluit Tom Hortons.

  From shawarma, we trekked over to the Tourist Information Centre.  Which had a couple neat exhibits.

This building houses the Tourist Information Centre and the Public Library.

One of the exhibits in the Tourist Information Centre.  A bunch of Nunavut's popular species were displayed in the centre with information about them and the Inuit on posters around the walls.

This two floored exhibit has a whale painted on the wall with sand, starfish, and fake fish along the ground.  The ceiling opens up as if you are looking through a hole in the ice to the world above.

 From the Tourist Info Centre, we went next door to the museum.  They had a lot of pictures from around Nunavut, some dating back to the 1920's when taking photos was a big deal and Nunavut was still the Northwest Territories.  The displays also included some Inuit tools and animal bones.

Ancient Inuit tool displayed in the museum.  I do not know its name.

I can imagine the above tool to be quite useful--while we were walking around it was -8° C and windy.  Even with my sunglasses on, I found myself squinting to keep the snow from blowing around the glasses and into my eyes.  Regardless of how I look at it though, all I can picture is Geordi LaForge:

Geordi LaForge from
Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The first two skulls are roughly the same size (which completely surprised me!).  The walrus skull sits on an area slightly smaller than my laptop (and you can see the nose area in the beluga skull picture).

Walrus skull and jaw bone, on display at the Iqaluit museum.

Beluga whale skull, on display at the Iqaluit museum.

Northern bottle-nosed whale skull without lower jaw bones, on display at the Iqaluit museum.

 As we walked back to the hotel, we saw a lot of ravens.  No wonder the Inuit believe they created man!  These massive birds have wingspans of 100-150 cm (I am only 168 cm tall) and quite a wide vocal range.  This one sitting on the wire made noises that sounded like dripping water.

A raven.

 Our hotel was on top of a hill, looking over most of Iqaluit.  The walk from the hotel down to the town was easy--Ashley even took to rolling down the hill a little--but coming back up was a little tough on the steep slippery slope.  We took a bit of a break at the top of the hill, then continued on to the warm hotel.

Me, with Iqaluit in the background.

 From my hotel room, I had an even better view of the city.  The windows don't have screens, so shutter-happy me opened it up and took a few photos:

Sunset over Iqaluit.  The igloo-like building roughly in the centre is a church.  The big white rectangular building to the left of that (partially cut off) is the grade school.

Looking south east-ish from my hotel room window over Iqaluit and mountains beyond the frozen bay.

Panorama view from my hotel window.

 Since I am a physicist, I (of course) see physics in everything, including this common cloud left behind by a passing air plane:

Sunset in Iqaluit.  Notice the white cloud formed from a plane, called a contrail, in the top left quadrant of the picture (explained in text).

 Of course, this is no ordinary cloud; it is a "contrail" (short for "aircraft condensation trail").  These clouds persist when they are frozen prior to evaporating.  The clouds spread out from the aircraft's path because of the different wind velocities in different locations.  When the air is sufficiently dry, as it is up here, the ice cloud will evaporate in ten minutes or so, leaving a very short trail.  In a more humid environment, such as South Western Ontario, the trails are much longer because the contrail does not evaporate as fast and can last for a much longer time (several hours).  The information about contrails here is taken from the picture book I borrowed from my supervisor, A colour guide to clouds by Richard Scorer and Harry Wexler.

While watching how quickly the contrail dissipated, I also couldn't help but notice how fast the sun was setting.  With my camera still in hand, I took a video of the sun setting over Iqaluit (which can be seen on Youtube here).  For those of you interested, the sun set at 6:32 PM; we had 11-12 hours of sunlight.  Note that the sun itself sets within the first 30 seconds (you can't really see it--I didn't zoom enough), but light persists for a while.  We still have light, despite the sun being below the horizon because the sun's rays are "bent" by our atmosphere and reflect off things, such as clouds.